IJCAI-15 Awards Announcement

The IJCAI Organization is proud to announce the IJCAI-15 Awards!

The IJCAI-15 Award for Research Excellence, the IJCAI John McCarthy Award, and the Computers and Thought Award are awarded by the IJCAI Board of Trustees, upon recommendation by the IJCAI-15 Awards Selection Committee, which consists of:

Tom Dietterich, Oregon State University (USA)

Craig Knoblock, University of Southern California, ISI (USA) (Chair)

Hector Levesque, University of Toronto (CANADA)

Peter Stone, University of Texas at Austin (USA), and

Sebastian Thrun, Udacity, Google and Stanford University (USA).

The IJCAI Awards Selection Committee receives advice from members of the IJCAI-15 Awards Review Committee, who comment on the accuracy of the nomination material and provide additional information about the nominees. The IJCAI-15 Awards Review Committee is the union of the former Conference Chairs of IJCAI, the IJCAI-15 Advisory Committee, the Program Chairs of the last three IJCAI conferences, and the past recipients of the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence and the IJCAI Distinguished Service Award, with nominees excluded.

IJCAI-15 Award for Research Excellence

The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality throughout an entire career yielding several substantial results. Past recipients of this honor are the most illustrious group of scientists from the field of Artificial Intelligence.They are: John McCarthy (1985), Allen Newell (1989), Marvin Minsky (1991), Raymond Reiter (1993), Herbert Simon (1995), Aravind Joshi (1997), Judea Pearl (1999), Donald Michie (2001), Nils Nilsson (2003), Geoffrey E. Hinton (2005), Alan Bundy (2007), Victor Lesser (2009, Robert Anthony Kowalski (2011), and Hector Levesque (2013).

The winner of the 2015 Award for Research Excellence is Barbara Grosz, Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at the School of Engineering and Natural Sciences,Harvard University. Professor Grosz is recognized for her pioneering research in Natural Language Processing and in theories and applications of Multiagent Collaboration.

The Talk of Barbara Grosz, A One Hundred Year Study on AI: Reflection and Discussion" is scheduled Thursday - 14.00-15.00 hrs - Room GH

The winner of the 2015 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is Ariel Procaccia, Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Procaccia is recognized for his contributions to the fields of computational social choice and computational economics, and for efforts to make advanced fair division techniques more widely accessible.

The Trustees of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) are pleased to announce the John McCarthy research award. This award is intended to recognize established mid-career researchers that have built up a major track record of research excellence in artificial intelligence. Recipients of the award will have made significant contributions to the research agenda in their area and will have a first-rate profile of influential research results.The award is named for John McCarthy (1927-2011), who is widely recognized as one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence. As well as giving the discipline its name, McCarthy made fundamental contributions of lasting importance to computer science in general and artificial intelligence in particular, including time-sharing operating systems, the LISP programming languages, knowledge representation, common-sense reasoning, and the logicist paradigm in artificial intelligence.The award was established with the full support and encouragement of the McCarthy family.

The winner of the 2015 inaugural John McCarthy Award is Bart Selman , Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Cornell University. Professor Selman is recognized for expanding our understanding of problem complexity and developing new algorithms for efficient inference.

At IJCAI-15, the Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award will be given to Anthony G. Cohn, Professor of Automated Reasoning at the University of Leeds. As a pioneering researcher in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Professor Cohn is recognized for his substantial contributions, as well as his outstanding service to the international, European and UK AI communities, including terms as President of IJCAI, ECCAI, KR Inc., and AISB, and as Editor-in-chief of the AI journal, where he made significant contributions to the success of the journal and to the wider dissemination of AI into the scientific community.